


Worship

by Sakiku



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Spanking, Spark Sex, Spiritual, Sticky Sex, Tentacles, Worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:50:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakiku/pseuds/Sakiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are chosen. You are Primus' Touched, and as such you will enter the Well of All Sparks to meet your creator and service him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yay, the first fic in my new AO3 account! It's an older kink-meme fill (one of my first for tf_anonkink) and I thought it's fitting I post it here first. Link to prompt: <http://tfanonkink.livejournal.com/491.html?thread=88811#t88811>

You stand on the edge, brightly polished and teetering on the intricately decorated ledge beneath your feet. Behind you, there are Primus' High Priests. And behind them, there is the crowd – loud, cheerful, anticipating, some of them chanting ancient prayers, others simply urging you on with well-wishes. They have gathered in the square beneath the open, noble gas illuminated skies of Cybertron. Crystal growth and metallic fractals shaped by eons of oxidation and crystallization make up the immediate surroundings before the living towers of Simfur rise in the distance.

That is what is behind you.

Before you, all of that drops off sharply into the dark, the unknown. Before you is a hole that leads into the darkest depths of the planet, so deep that your sensors cannot get an estimate of just how far down it is. The Well of All Sparks, it has been termed by the High Priests.

And the crowd behind you wants you to jump. Everyone is waiting for you to jump.

They have decorated you, inlaid your armor plates with precious gems, painted you, polished you. They have told you how much of an honor it is to be chosen like this. They have told you how jealous of you they are. And they have bared you in the most intimate ways, removed the armor plates from your chest, from your pelvis, disabled the locking mechanisms of your interface panel and your spark casing. The only reason you aren't giving all of Cybertron an inappropriate show of your internal workings is that they have veiled you in silks and fine metal gauze.

You swallow. They are waiting for you to jump. For you to meet your Maker, even though they have reassured you that it will not be permanent in any way. They actually think that you will go to Primus' core and service Him until He sends you back. And so they have taught you manners, how to speak, how to conduct yourself, what to expect. They have spent nearly twenty orns on preparing you for this joor.

Somehow, amongst all your instructions, you must have missed the bit about jumping down an endless hole.

To you, it feels like they are waiting for you to sacrifice yourself. Has anyone asked you if you agreed with this? Has anyone asked you what you think of this... this lunacy? Jumping down a hole in the hopes of meeting your God at the bottom, and then hope to survive the experience and come back to tell the story? But with Primus' High Priests behind you and those thousands of mechs waiting eagerly behind them, there is nothing you can do but take that one step forward, that one step that takes the ground out from beneath your feet.

With a bitter smile, you fall into darkness.

Maybe you wonder how you got to be here. Maybe you want to curse whoever that prankster was that painted those glyphs onto your helmet – those glyphs that some equally cursable High Priests identified as the Touch of Primus. Because there is no way that you can believe that Primus has chosen you. You are nothing but a medic, a student fresh out of Iacon's university. You are nothing special – and you most assuredly don't believe in Primus the way you probably should.

You do know that he is the one to have given you life. But beyond that you have never seen any evidence of his presence. To you, he is like an anonymous creator that has placed you into the world, and then callously left you to fend for yourself. You have seen too many injured mechs, too many poor mechs, too many mechs with horror stories to believe in a Maker watching over you.

And yet, you have been told, those glyphs on your helmet tell that your Maker is calling for you. Wants you to pleasure him, wants you to worship him, wants you to give yourself to him without reserve.

It has been a million stellar cycles since Primus has chosen his last Touched. You are the next, and you still don't believe it even though you are falling because others believe it. Even your friends believe it, traitors that they are to hand you over to the High Priests without protest. You had not been created yet a million stellar cycles ago. You do not know anything about the past Touched except for the stories you have been told by Primus' High Priests while they prepared you for your duties. And you know as well as anyone that stories can be made to lie. Did those Touched really return from the Well of All Sparks? Did they really return from that fall into darkness?

You try not to think such horrifying thoughts, but your ground-pounder processors run hot in sheer terror from free fall.

Air is rushing past your sensors, at one point ripping the wildly flapping metallic cloths from your body. Your paralyzed processors pick strange things to wonder over. Why have the priests fastened them there anyway? Was it simply out of some misguided concern that you not bare your internals for all mechs to see? Or do they even know what you are going through right now? They certainly could have warned you.

It doesn't take long before a gauge pings its way into your terrified attention: you have reached terminal velocity. You are running hot, trembling, holding your limbs close to your body because you don't know how close the walls around you are. If you could, you would curl yourself into that cometary form many transformers have. With it, a fall like this would grant at least a reasonable chance of survival. However you have never seen a reason to uploaded the specs for planetary reentry, and so you have to fall through the darkness in your basic form. If you survive this, you swear to yourself that getting a cometary form will be the very first thing you do.

Neither your optics nor your other sensors are of any help in penetrating the darkness. Something is blocking both active and passive scans, rendering you entirely blind. You don't know what would be worse – seeing your doom approach, or falling into the complete unknown. Your processors are gibbering hysterically anyway. You tuck your limbs in a bit further. If you have to die, you want to do it all at once at the bottom of the chasm, and not painfully ripped apart by hitting one obstacle after the other on your way down.

You desperately count the micro-clicks as something to focus on beyond the terror. You know your terminal velocity, and as such you can calculate the distance you must have fallen by now. It takes a lot longer than it should to come up with the result of thirty kilosteps. You are growing tenser and tenser because you are expecting to hit something just about any click now. Instead, you continue falling and screaming inside your processors.

How long still, you ask yourself, and try not to imagine what your body will look like after impacting on a solid surface at your velocity. You have repaired enough mechs with various levels of impact damage to know that it most definitely will not be a pretty sight. Couldn't they have at least left you your chest armor to protect your spark chamber better? And yet you know that immediate deactivation is the preferable way to go – if you are especially unlucky, your body is strong enough to let you survive the immediate fall. Then you will be left on the bottom of the hole, feeling your spark gutter out slowly from the damage to your physical body.

You have been falling for more than a breem now, and you struggle with the sheer heat produced by your terrified processors. It is getting hard to hold that level of mortal terror inside you. Processors aren't made for that kind of strain.

So you let those subroutines take over that cross the denial state and the state where you are looking for any way to save yourself, until you reach a terrifying submission to fate. There is nothing at all you can do, no information to incorporate to maybe save yourself, no other actions to take than to curl yourself up as small as possible in the hopes that you will not hit anything on your way down. There are only memory images and extrapolations of how this is going to end, one more horrific than the other.

In a move that might be considered cowardly, you let your higher-order processing freeze because you just can't cope anymore.

For a long time, there is silence but for the slowly densifying atmosphere rushing by you as you fall further and further towards Cybertron's core.

You could find out how much later it is, but you are too paralyzed to look at your chronometer when you feel first tingles of a magnetic field brushing against your plates. It is circular, surrounding you, and you fall through its center like a tunnel. You can feel your metal tingle where it tries to obey the command of the magnet, and you can feel the electric currents that get induced inside you. You can feel how it is slowing down your fall, how the magnetic friction tingles your components until you vibrate with the electric potential growing inside you.

Some of the threads you have frozen to prevent a full-scale processor melt-down get notified by your sensors, and they resume their processing on a less critical level. There is once again hope rising inside you, hope that you might not fall to your death. And judging from the reduced airflow against your plates and the deceleration tugging at your struts, you are indeed slowing. Slowing more and more until you feel as if you are hanging weightlessly in the grip of the magnetic field with fans and processors racing in terror.

Only then do you realize that your coolant has heated up dangerously, barely capable of keeping your frantic processors calm. You terminate several subroutines that are still running in panicked endless loops although the immediate danger of free fall has passed. It lightens the strain on your processors enough that your core temperature is going down again without frying anything.

You can't tell if you're still moving very slowly, or if the magnetic field is holding you immobile. You don't really mind the difference for now, too preoccupied trying to ease your processors back to something resembling regular functioning.

When your palm brushes against something, you instinctively flinch back. However, the touch didn't hurt, and the sound of metal scraping against your plates is being reflected strangely. Almost as if...

You emit several questing sonar pulses, and the reflecting echo paints a strange picture of your surroundings. Apparently, you are hanging less than two spans above the ground, having moved into a horizontal position for maximum air resistance during your fall.

You move your arm, and your plates once again encounter the ground. With more relief than you ever thought you'd feel, you get your feet, your other arm, your knees in touch with the stable surface. The magnetic field is clearly lowering you, because after several micro-clicks, your limbs get to carry more and more of your weight. When you are finally safe on the ground, you barely manage to refrain from petting it in thanks. Nonetheless, you do nothing but lie there for long clicks and let the cool metal sooth your overheated processors, basking in the knowledge that you are still alive.

It takes you almost three breems before your systems have stabilized enough to even think about getting up again.

By that time, you have sent off a couple more sonar pulses, inordinately glad that you aren't entirely blind anymore. You can deduct that there is a tunnel leading away from the vertical pit you have just dropped into. The image resolution of reflected sound waves isn't very high, but it gives you a reasonable certainty that the tunnel is passable for you.

With a near-silent groan, you get up. Judging from the smoothness of the walls of the shaft, it will be completely impossible to climb it back up. If you had any tools to cut handholds into the metal with, you might have had a chance. As things are, you curse the priests for stripping you of everything including your welders and laser scalpels, and for leaving you with only one way out.

It takes you a while to stop your joints from trembling, but then you head towards what hopefully will turn out to be an exit. Sonar doesn't warn you of any loose rocks or other small obstacles, so you step carefully. However, the ground is strangely clear of debris, and you discover that the tunnel is easily tall enough to allow you to walk through unhindered.

You don't know how long you have been walking through absolute darkness with only your sonar to guide you. After the strut-deep scare of the fall has lost some of its immediacy, you feel a bit betrayed after all that hype about you being Primus' Touched. Even if you never really bought into that – there is no Maker to see anywhere, only darkness and more darkness. Well, at least you're not falling down an endless chute anymore. Is this what it feels like to wander through the Pit?

But you have never really believed Primus taking interest in His creation beyond setting them into the world anyway, so you focus your processors on finding a way back to the surface. There is no doubt in you that it will be a very, very long journey, especially since there is no upward slant to the tunnel you are walking through. But you grimly swear to yourself that you will see your friends again, Wheeljack, Strongarm, Velocity, even if it kills you.

You do have a built-in chronometer, but you are not sure whether you can trust it. Ever since you were halted by that magnetic field, it has seemed to count the micro-clicks strangely. As long as you are watching it, everything goes alright. However as soon as you don't pay attention to it, time seems to jump in strange intervals. Sometimes, much less time passes than you think it has; other times it goes by a lot faster than you are used to.

You wonder – is it your chronometer that is malfunctioning, or is it your processors?

If it was someone else with the malfunction, you would know exactly how to treat them – second year, Basic Internal Systems Maintenance class with Mechanic Coredump. However, you can hardly plug into your own processors and compare the readings of your chronometer against themselves. So you decide to just walk on and ignore the weird time measurements. If you come out of this alive, you will have enough time for non-vital repairs like these.

After two joor according to your chronometer, you realize that your photon receptors are finally registering some very low activity. Your electromagnetic sensors are still going haywire, but your optics manage to detect a tiny amount of light.

Your relief is completely out of proportion to that miniscule brightening.

And then you get started on thinking about what kind of light might exist several hundred kilosteps beneath Cybertron's surface. Your relief vanishes as quickly as it has started, making way for a growing unease. You have heard stories about those who vanish without ever being seen again. Have they fallen into that same hole you have been made to jump into? Have they been disassembled by underground critters that prey on metallic life forms?

However, there is nothing you can do. The tunnel you are walking through hasn't had any side branches leading off. The only way to evade whatever causes the light would be going back, and that is not an option.

Carefully, you continue onward.

And then you suddenly realize that there is a nearly inaudible hum in the air. It sounds a bit like the steady drone of an alternating current, and yet you feel that there is so much more to it. You stop dead to listen. The dense atmosphere conducts sound well, buffering you from all sides with the continuous vibrations. They are subtle and so faint that you might have mistaken them for the noise of your own systems, but they remain a constant outside your own actions. Why have you not noticed the sound before?

You go back through your memory files, but you can't pin-point when it has started. You can just confirm that it has been slowly growing stronger the further down you walked the tunnel until it went above your auditory threshold just now. There are no suggestions though what the sound might be despite a strange familiarity.

Even tenser now, you resume walking once again.

Slowly, you realize that the light must be targeted in your direction. You have to squint more and more because the light source shines directly into your optics. And it is bright. Very bright. Soon, you are as blind as you had been when you started your walk in darkness. But you still make your way forward, guided by sonar and careful digits against the tunnel wall.

Together with the light, the hum increases in intensity. If you had had any doubts before, you would know now at the very latest that both sound and light come from the same direction. Thanks to the greater amplitude, you can distinguish more frequency modulations of the sound. And you realize that its continuous drone is far from being monotone. There are hundreds and thousands of tiny modulations whose migrations in and of themselves are not meaningful at all. But in concert, they are slowly shaping and changing the overall feeling of the hum on a level which makes it amorphous in quality. (1)

You wonder what a mech with a more acute acoustic sensor suite and better sound processing modules would be able to read from it.

Then all of a sudden, the walls and the floor drop away into a huge cavern, leaving you nothing but a small ledge to stand on. Your sonar has tried to inform you, but you are too unused to relying on it to have gained much of a warning. With your fans whirling to try and keep your scared surprise in check, you carefully feel with your pedes for where the ledge continues, always keeping your digits in contact with the wall. You really, really don't want to drop into yet another freefall.

The hum has not grown much louder upon your entry into the cavern. However, it has a strange quality of winding itself into your processors and your circuits and then somehow dropping beneath your attention threshold. You feel deep inside that there is an unmistakable harmony, that more processing power would help you decode its meaning. But somehow, it always escapes you at the last moment.

When the intensity of the light doesn't taper off but at least seems focused in one direction, you turn your back to it and carefully unshutter your optics. It is still bright, so incredibly bright, but at least within your design tolerances now that you aren't looking into it directly. You shutter and unshutter your optics a couple of times to encourage your photon receptors to reset a bit quicker. It takes a while for your vision to recover, but what you see leaves you completely in awe.

Just as the sound, the light is one steady color that is nonetheless pulsing and changing slowly with an incredible array of different wavelengths.

You have ended up facing one of the cave walls, meaning the light source has to be somewhere in its center. Judging from the angle your muted shadow falls, it must be nearly exactly behind you, hovering in the center of the cavern. Is this what it feels like being on a planet orbiting a star?

Bathed in that blinding light, you can make out parts of what your sonar has already told you. The cave is huge, so big that the pulses of your sonar are absorbed by the atmosphere before they can be reflected to you. You can't even say if there is a ceiling at all to the cave, so high it is. And below you, the small ledge seems to be winding down towards a ground which is so far down that you have to strain to see it.

Shielding your optics from the glare, you turn your head from side to side. As long as you don't have the cave center in your field of vision, you can make out some details in the glistering blue-white light. It stretches farther than you can see, and everywhere there are niches and tunnels leading off into darkness, but with no ledges to reach them.

You do not know what has made the cave, because its walls and even the corners where tunnels branch off are completely smooth. They arch and curve, and yet there are no segments or sharp edges anywhere. It is almost as if everything had been poured in one single cast. Thankfully, the walls don't have the smoothness of a mirror finish that would reflect light and make everything unbearable bright. However, it is clearly visible that they have been polished to a dull shine. And that is something not even the ever-present microphages, nanobots that can be found virtually everywhere on Cybertron, can manage. Microphages process loose metallic shavings, reverse any potential oxidation, and then reintegrate the pure metal atoms into the nearest large-scale molecular grid. Their microscopic level of action would make it possible to create such an... organic-looking structure; however that would require constant instructions on where to direct their work.

And you don't see how anyone could care to create such a work of art so many lengths beneath Cybertron's surface.

You redirect your attention towards the atmosphere filtering through your vents. A soft mist of noble gases hangs around, charged with the electromagnetics that you can feel swirling all around you until the molecules ionize and make the very air glow with their characteristic spectrum.

It is only then that you realize your electromagnetic sensors that have been inactive since you fell down the hole, are working once again. The light must be generated by a very energy-rich source because the radiation is nearly as debilitating for your EM sensors as the light is for your optics. How you could have missed that until now, you don't know.

The second realization, following immediately upon the first, is that the electromagnetic spectrum, too, contains the same amorphous qualities of the light and the sound. The cave almost feels alive like this, and something inside you wants to pulse and merge itself into the frequencies all around you. It is a surreal experience.

For some reason, fear at the unknown does not add itself into the equation. It takes you time to adjust to the intensity of input, but once you are used to it it seems natural. Like you have always known it. Like you have come home.

You finally restart your journey along the walls of the cave, following the only way left for you to take. Hopefully, there is nothing dangerous waiting for you in the distance where your sensors simply cannot penetrate through the intense radiation of the miniature star hanging above it.

When you round yet another bend in the cave walls and see him, your vents stall.

The wall drops back until the ledge forms a sizable platform, a niche that stretches high into the air and promises some protection. But that is not what catches your attention.

Primus, is the mech beautiful.

He is tall. Sitting on a... throne in this niche, he is taller than you are standing up. And you aren't a small mech. You don't think you have ever seen a non-cityformer mech this tall except for one of the space-capable shuttles. Even Prime when you were presented to him as His next Touched, didn't make you feel this small.

His limbs are long and thin, full of grace and elegant design. It is not a design you are familiar with – both ancient and far beyond current capabilities at the same time. His protoform glows in the pulsating light, gleaming and absorbing frequencies until you feel that he is the only spot in this entire cave you can look at without the intense light hurting your optics. He looks otherworldly bathed in the ionized halogen emissions. He does not wear armor, and yet you instinctively know that he is not unprotected by far.

But despite his extravagant exterior, his most beautiful feature is his EM-fields. They swirl around his chassis in controlled currents, each layer creating artful patterns that reach from microwave to gamma spectrum. And yet, they mix and mingle with the spectrum saturating the entire cave as if they were part of the whole. You can see it all, and you wonder how a mech must be built to produce fields like this. He is harmonious, both within himself and with his surroundings, in a way you have never encountered before.

When he turns his patient and benevolent optics upon you, you don't have the processing power left to wonder how he can look at you without being blinded by the small sun behind you.

“So you have finally found your way here, young one,” he smiles, and together with him the entire cave smiles.

His voice echoes through the cavern and through your struts and through your processors, and you know you would do anything – anything – this voice asks you to. You step forward, feeling small and unworthy in front of this grand mech. It doesn't even cross your processors that he could have not noticed you, that he could be talking to someone else. Instead, you drop to your knees and bow to him until your forehead touches the ground.

There is no doubt in your spark that this is your Maker.

Although the first words coming to your mind are those that have been taught to you by the High Priests, you say them with a conviction you had never thought possible when you learned them.

“Your creation has heard your call, and your creation has come to do your bidding. Speak the word, and it will be done.”

–

(1) Try Steve Reich for an approximation of what I'm trying to describe. “Desert Music” is what comes closest, in my opinion, if you take away the obvious lead instruments/singers.


	2. Chapter 2

There is awe in your spark. Awe to a degree you hadn't believed yourself capable of. Not when Primus has always been a distant creator to you, someone who doesn't hold any relevance in your daily world where Empties become a more and more common sight, where younglings are abandoned simply for what they are, where bad things happen to good mechs and good thing to bad mechs.

Kneeling here in front of Him, his avatar at least because Primus is your planet, the very ground you stand on and the air you filter and the metal you are built of – kneeling here in front of Him, you just can't reconcile the warmth of the fields surrounding you with the image of an uncaring creator. His EMs flow through you with welcoming and love, and you get the impression that he can see everything in your spark. Even those things you'd rather hide.

He hums a bit, a nice sound that integrates smoothly with the continuous hum that has already sunken into your struts and makes you vibrate on a molecular level.

And then he hits your sorest points. “You say my creation has heard my call. And yet you doubted. Why?”

You press your forehead closer to the ground in shame. The worst of it is, you think, that he doesn't even sound disappointed in you. Merely curious. “Because I...” It is so incredibly hard to get out the words, to admit your weakness. “Because I didn't – didn't think you would be there. Didn't think you'd be... real. Primus. Why me?”

His EM fields continue pulsing harmonically, so beautiful that you can barely stand them. “Why not you?” he wants to know.

You shiver, all those ugly things inside your spark, which you are only too aware of, coming forth in a helpless rush. Anger, frustration, fear that you have been bottling up ever since your traitorous friends alerted the High Priests to that glyph appearing on your helmet. “Because I'm just – just a medic!” You clench your servos, powerless to stop your raging. “I don't believe in you, I'm sarcastic, I'm young, I'm inexperienced, and I don't know what in Unicron's name I'm doing here!”

“But you are still my creation,” he states when you manage to get your traitorous voice box under control again. “Why would I not choose you?”

The warmth and conviction in his EM fields is nearly painful. You don't - can't say anything in the face of such trust. You just think that it isn't justified. If you could, you would press yourself even closer to the ground and flatten your EM fields even closer to your plates.

“Come here, Ratchet,” he finally says, and he still doesn't sound or feel angry. Why?

With trepidation in your processors, you get up and walk closer to him. One by one, you take the steps leading to his throne, reluctance dragging your pedes. You can't quite meet his optics because... well, how can you when His presence fills the entire cavern and you know only all too well what He can see in your spark? You feel small and unworthy next to him, like an errant sparkling that knows it has done something wrong and is waiting for the other shoe to drop. You are afraid of what you will see in his face because, even if his EM-fields don't show it, he surely must be disappointed in you.

And, you think, that seeing such disappointment would break something inside you.

He sighs and you barely suppress a flinch. “Will it make you feel better if I punish you for your shortcomings, Ratchet?”

You freeze. Your optics involuntarily rush up to meet his. He looks at you with a patience and a love that you don't think you deserve even though your insecure, little spark craves it.

“P-punish?” you manage to repeat.

Apparently there is something in your spark that he can read, because he motions you closer again. “Come here, little one.”

Reluctantly you follow his urgings until you stand at the same level as him, to the right of his knee, so close that you could touch the armrest of his throne or his leg struts if you wished. He is so tall that his knee is waist height on you, and the servo he is reaching out for you nearly spans your shoulders. You tense. Will Primus actually touch you?

When he makes contact with your armor plates, you flinch again and duck your head. His touch isn't painful in any way though; he merely rests his palm against your upper back. Actually his servo is warm and comfortable, vibrating slightly with the harmonics all around you. Despite this metal body being just an avatar for His presence, it feels like a mech touching you. It is His fields though that tell of more, more than you could ever be.

You look up at him in mute trepidation, all too aware all of a sudden that he can see your bared spark chamber and your unlocked interface panel. And yet you make no move to cover yourself, because despite this physical nakedness your spark is so much more naked in front of his steady gaze.

“Do you need to be punished, Ratchet?” he asks gravely.

Fear flows through your processors, but not as much as you thought you would feel. There is so much love and greatness in his EM-field that you know it's not a trick question. He doesn't ask you because he is trying to trip you into an admission of guilt – denial being grounds for double punishment, scrap like that. No, that's not how the situation feels, and somehow that makes it even worse. You know that he will accept any answer you give. Even if you say 'no'.

You tremble. It would be so easy to say 'no', wouldn't it? And yet...

Your spark twists as you stare at the chest plates of His avatar. Or rather, where his chest plates would be if he wore armor. His surface struts aren't even layered with microfilaments that are necessary for binding armor to a mech. You can see the elegant wires and energon lines in his chest, leading away from his opaque spark chamber, going into it. It occurs to you that he is equally bared as you, his intricately decorated spark chamber free for anyone to see. And yet, he looks by far less... naked than you feel with only two major armor plates missing.

Between his lines, you can see powerful hydraulics and pneumatics, a tank for energon storage, the occasional cluster of redundant processor backups, and you realize that the medic inside you has unconsciously started mapping everything. Just in case that you need to repair him.

You avert your optics, uncomfortable. The servo on your back is a heavy weight even though he doesn't push you in any direction. You don't want to be punished, and yet...

“Yes.”

It slips out before you notice, and you are surprised to hear that you have actually vocalized it out loud. All your systems freeze, because there is no way you can take it back now that it has been said. Well, maybe he would allow you to, but... no, you can't take it back. You are a mech that stands by what he says, even if you are afraid of the consequences.

One of his digits reaches up from where he has rested his servo against your back and caresses your helmet. You shiver.

“It is alright, little one,” he assures even as he pushes you slightly until you are pressed against his outer thigh. “It is alright to need to be punished. And it is alright to be afraid. I promise I will not harm you.” He smiles so warmly, his EM's welcome you so openly that you feel safe despite his words. “Will you bend across my lap?”

You are all too aware that he has used 'harm', not 'hurt'. Subglyphs that mean he will not damage you. Not subglyphs promising no pain. And as a medic, you know that there are plenty of ways to inflict pain without causing damage. Nonetheless, you follow his instructions with as little fuss as possible even as you tremble a bit. Punishment isn't supposed to be pleasant.

His legs are just tall enough that you can bend across his thighs without your pedes leaving the ground. You try to keep the touch at a minimum at first, but the servo on your back pushes you down until your upper body is supported entirely by him. Not quite knowing what to do with your arms, you rest them on the far side of his lap, your optics suddenly only microlengths away from his throne, his beautiful leg assembly.

Something about this feels sacrilegious, but it is too late to change your mind now.

It is only when you shift a bit to get comfortable that you realize that your unlocked interface panel presses against one of his legs, while your bared spark casing presses against the other. You squirm in in alarm, but he keeps holding you down, doesn't allow you to find a less embarrassing position.

“It is alright, Ratchet,” he repeats and smacks your aft. Not a teasing smack, but a full-palmed, resounding metallic clank. “I will not harm you.”

You are too stunned by the impact to react in any way. And he doesn't give you much time to process before the second one falls, the third, until he settles in a steady rhythm of spanking your aft.

It hurts.

You voice a half-hearted protest, which he just ignores. Every blow jostles the impact sensors beneath your plates, mashes your armor against sensitive protoform. It stings and flares out, and the longer he keeps it up the worse the pain gets.

This is undignified. Terribly so. You are sprawled across his lap; Primus, he even holds you down. You want to squirm and push away, because slag, it hurts, and yet you remain because you have chosen to be there. And that somehow hurts even more, in a place where your pain sensors and your aching protoform can't reach.

You close your optics and clench your fists and endure because this is your just punishment.

His smacks are steady, rhythmic, no variation in strength or angle. First one side of your aft, then the other, then the first one again in an endless repetition. The blows are hard, hard enough to push your helmet nearly against the armrest on the other side of his lap. And yet, there is no leverage for you to brace against, so you just clench your fists a bit harder and try not to move too much.

It hurts to the depths of your spark that you need to be punished like this.

The pain in your bottom turns into a steady drone, only punctuated by the highlight of the smack, like a spot-weld amongst an aching current. And he just continues on and on, and the pain is just big enough that you can never get quite used to it, that it remains a hurting entity in your consciousness.

Your spark twists in dark satisfaction, your guilt and faults finally being given what they deserve.

Gradually though you become aware that every blow also pushes your interface panel and your spark casing against his thighs. You don't know how he has managed to place you this way because by all physical laws your surrounding armor should prevent contact between his thighs and your bared features. As it is, the rocking motion provides you with stimulation to those exquisitely sensitive parts, and to your utter mortification it feels good. Light, like a teasing caress, just enough to be utterly maddening.

You freeze and try not to buck into his leg. You wall off your panic and fervently hope that he doesn't realize how aroused you are becoming. This is supposed to be punishment.

Clang.

A bloom of pain, a bit slower a bloom of pleasure as the stimulation registers in your processors. Clang. The other side of your aft. Clang. The first one again in an endless loop, until it stops suddenly.

It is only with the absence of the repetitive clanks that you realize how hard your fans are turning, and that you are clutching at his leg for dear life. He is still holding you down, caressing your aft softly, but no blows. At first you don't feel anything because your sensors have become numb to anything less intense than a strike, but gradually your sensitivity returns until even his light touch is nearly painful. And it still feels good.

You want to keen your failure.

“It is also alright to become aroused, little one,” he comments drily. His EMF feel amused, and you want to sink into the ground for forgetting about your own fields. While you might not have reacted physically, your EMF has broadcast – is broadcasting – your excitement quite clearly. He continues, vibes of arousal coloring his EMF, too. “I think it is only fair to incorporate that into your punishment. Since you seem to take so much enjoyment from it, I will not stop unless you overload.”

He what now? Alarmed you try to turn your head enough to catch a glimpse of his face, but before you can gauge his expression he pushes you down again and the next blow falls. You barely cut off a yelp. Your aft feels overly sensitive, the first couple of blows disproportionally painful. It hurts badly, really bad now, and a whine escapes you. Despite deserving all of it, you instinctively try to squirm away. But between the hand holding you down and the legs you are pushed against, there is next to no room to move. Slowly and painfully you get back into the rhythm, letting the strikes rock you against his leg.

It still feels good, the pleasure blooming after every strike. Somehow that makes it even worse. He wants you to overload.

You bury your face in your arm as the blows continue raining down on you. With every impact your spark jumps, churning with pain, embarrassment, arousal, shame, and too many emotions to name. Your fans are spinning, sucking in dense streams of halogen filled air in a desperate effort to cool your processors. You know he won't stop until you have overloaded, and you barely keep your fear in check. What if you can't? What if the pain becomes too much?

You squirm again, trying to believe his earlier words that he will not harm you. It certainly doesn't feel like that right now. And yet, the charge tingling through the outer reaches of your chassis tells an entirely different story.

“Open your interface panel,” he commands without interrupting his beat, and you obey with a half sob. It is only then that you realize your spike is hard and your valve is dripping, clenching around nothing with every strike. How did it get this far? Your spike tries to extend, but his leg puts a stop to that. The impacts rub your cord mercilessly against his protoform, a broad pressure after the spot-weld-like sting of a smack. It is not pleasure, not completely; it's too wild for that. And nonetheless your fans hitch with every blow, your processors swimming from all the charge being generated.

You can feel how your EMF churns with confusion, and how his calmer and infinitely more harmonic one wraps around you. He has enfolded you in his fields, in warmth and arousal and encouragement, but it is the last that is hardest to bear: absolution. He enfolds you in his forgiveness, giving you an unconditional pardon for your faults, your doubts, your failures.

You keen, trying to get away and yet trying to push closer as pain and pleasure mingle together until you can't tell anymore which is which. It is too much, too much to bear the weight of his love which gives everything and yet expects nothing in return. You aren't – you can't –

His field doesn't flinch back from your turmoil, your pain or your shame. Instead it presses itself into you, tries to soothe your jagged edges and your tortured flares with its harmonics. And faced with such strength, with a field that fills an entire cavern with its beautiful hum, you are powerless to resist.

You grasp at his thigh in a last-ditch effort to keep the world from spiraling out beneath you. You hurt and you feel good, and you feel like you should be ashamed but you can't be when Primus is encouraging you with his EMF like that -

The overload hits you like a sledgehammer where you convulse against his legs. His blows are nearly brutal now, but you are so glad for them because they smash your cord against his thigh with every impact, and it even makes you spurt some of your transfluid against the rim of your desperate valve. With his other hand he forces you down even harder until you can feel the electric discharges from your spark chamber zapping his thigh, and it is incredibly painful and unbelievably glorious and entirely beyond words.

It is Primus you overload for and Primus you overload because of, and behind all your guilt your spark starts singing in joy.

When your processors have reached safe operating temperatures again, you realize you are still lying across Primus' lap, completely limp except for your weakly twitching fists. The servo on your back prevents you from sliding off; the other is stroking your sore aft, creating small aftershocks of both pain and pleasure. You find you are very comfortable like this, even though there is lubricant and spent transfluid dripping down your legs. You can't find the will in yourself to be embarrassed about that.

Primus chuckles, and his entire EMF chuckles together with him. “Back again, little one?”

“Mmh,” is all you manage.

“Feel better now?”

To your surprise or, well, not so great surprise, you actually do. He has – you feel calm. Might be the afterglow speaking, but you are at ease in his presence. A halfhearted snort escapes you. Maybe that kind of method will work on your patients, too, smack them to overload and then repair them while they're out of it?

You shift and wince at your sore aft. Well, maybe not. You'd just have more to repair in such cases.

But enough of yourself. You can still feel arousal coating Primus' fields, and you think you should do something about it. Even if you still don't quite get how Primus, a being so many times bigger than you, could have chosen you as his Touched, you can at least try and accept it.

Your physique doesn't quite allow the twist of your upper body necessary to meet his optics, but you are sure he can read the sincerity in your offer. “Would you like me to service you in return?”


	3. Chapter 3

Primus still doesn't let you up. Instead, he continues stroking your sore aft. He hums a bit, and somehow the vibration translates directly onto your spark casing which is still pressed against his thigh. You shiver.

“Will you allow me the use of your frame, little one? Your valve, your spike?” he quietly asks. “Your spark?”

Despite once again knowing that you can say 'no' to any of it, all of it, it is not a real decision for you. How could you refuse your God anything when your spark is still spinning in joy and the tingling remainders of afterglow start melding seamlessly into the grounding for a new charge? When you can feel His love for you and the arousal – arousal _you_ have caused – coating His fields?

Your rueful chuckle comes out more like a huff. “As long as you don't mind that I probably won't be able to keep myself from overloading again.”

The high priests that have prepared you for His service would probably short out to hear you talking to Him like this. You don't care. You know He will understand your words in the spirit you meant them.

He finally lets you get up with an amused and pleased brush of His fields against yours. “Oh, do not worry about that, little one. In fact, you overloading is what I am counting on.”

Again you shiver, both from the promise in His voice and the sudden coolness against your front as you are standing up straight again. You hadn't even realized just how warm and comfortable his lap was.

For a few nanoklicks you contemplate hiding your interfacing equipment away again, splattered with your transfluid as it is. But then you realize that covering your spike and your valve won't hide the distinguished trails down your legs, and instead you reach into your subspace for a cleaning cloth. Your first thought goes to Him though, and you look for the spots where you must have inevitably soiled him. To your surprise, His leg assembly is pristine, no signs of you having had a spike overload against him. When you look at Him in question, the only answer you receive is a mysterious smile both on His face and vibrating through His fields.

You blink a couple of times and step away to start cleaning your own leg assembly instead. Your sore aft twinges a bit with every motion you make, but it is more a pleasant reminder than a painful hurt.

Once you are done, you subspace the cloth again and turn to Him for further instructions. His entire body glows in the amorphously pulsating light as he motions you to come closer again. As soon as you are in reaching distance, He grabs you under your arms and lifts you as if you weighed nothing more than a sparkling. Compared to his size, you _are_ nothing more than a sparkling, but your armor must make you quite a bit heavier in comparison than your size would indicate.

But he still lifts you effortlessly, pulls you up and turns you until you hastily slam your optics shut because you are looking directly into the miniature sun in the center of the cave. His arms are crossed now, one across your chest and one behind your back to reach your armpits, and he is still holding you effortlessly. He draws you to His chest until you think you must be hovering above his lap. And then, he slowly sets you down.

Your pedes encounter his thighs first, and you instinctively move your legs to both sides of his. He lowers you further and further until it becomes unmistakable that you are to straddle his lap. You tuck in your pedes for a kneeling position, much better than letting your legs hang somewhere in front of you. Your sore aft brushes His abdominal flexsteel, and you can't help the soft echo of pain-pleasure ghosting through your neural lines.

The further you are lowered, the larger the angle of your spread thighs becomes. When you are finally seated, you don't think you could get up on your own again. Your hip armor is rotated outwards to the maximal degree, and your flexibility is tested to the extreme. He adjusts his grip on you and pulls you back a bit until your aft is firmly pressed against His groin and your back resting against His chest. It reduces the strain on your hips a bit, and while you still don't think you could get up on your own it is at least comfortable.

Very comfortable, in fact.

You relax into His hold, into the vibrations that seem to be an intrinsic part of His body. Your optics remain shut because the sun shines directly into your face. The electromagnetic intensity alone is enough to deal with; there is no need for you to damage your photon receptors by trying to get a visual, too.

Meanwhile, His servos are gliding across your frame, smoothing over armor plates, dipping into the crevices between them. There are no overt sexual touches, but you find yourself building a charge nonetheless. Especially with the way He seems to avoid touching your interface panel entirely. You haven't closed it again because it seems kind of silly to do so when he has already seen you in your entire glory. Your spike is slowly pressurizing without any attention, and your valve, spread above the empty gap between his thighs, is aching for stimulation of any kind.

You squirm a bit. It is more instinct than deliberate action that has you reach for your spike, but His arms are in the way. At first you think it is just coincidence that He reaches for one of your ventral seams just at the right moment to block your servo, but when it happens a second and a third time you get the message. Alright, no touching.

There might have been an undignified whimper escaping your vocalizer, and you might have tried clenching your legs to get at least a little bit of stimulation that way. You are quite disappointed when it doesn't work and instead only highlights the empty ache inside you.

He answers you with a chuckle. “I see you are getting impatient. Will you allow me to fill your valve, little one?”

Your resounding 'yes' pushes hungrily into His fields, and His arousal feeds on yours and feeds back into yours until you are gasping with pleasure.

He once again grabs you under your arms and lifts you. Only a little bit this time, only the distance necessary for Him to open His interface panel and extend His spike. Because as soon as He starts setting you down again, you can feel pressure against your valve. Instinctively you cant your hips a bit, and you are rewarded by a pleasured ripple through His fields.

You don't know how it works, but somehow His spike finds the wetness of your valve on its own. With every micron he is lowering you, the tip of His spike pushes further against you until your walls open enough to let Him slip inside.

You gasp and can't do anything but tremble in His grip as He keeps lowering you onto His spike. You can feel every single micron of him sliding into you, opening you, stretching you and exciting ever more sensory nodes that are linked directly to your pleasure center. He pushes further and further into you with an unyielding gentleness that threatens to blow your processors apart, and you think you would let him do just about anything to you as long as he doesn't stop what he is doing now.

When you carry your own weight again, your sore aft snug against his abdominal flexsteel, He fills you so perfectly that you can't even think of moving. He is that tiny bit too large that hints at the possibility of pain, when all it does in reality is catalyze your charge. Your own spike twitches in sympathy, but you don't feel any need to stroke it with the overwhelming sensations in your valve.

It could have been klicks it could have been joors, it could have been vorns. You just sit in His lap, head thrown back to rest against His chest, His spike deep within you. You don't know what He is doing, because he doesn't move and yet there is a tingling squirming inside your valve. It explores you softly, gently, stretches your inner walls in a way that should feel alien but actually transcends pleasure. Primus' arms hold your hips to his while his fields pulse with arousal all around you, enfolding you tightly. It is ecstatic and you hold on to His thighs in an attempt to not let it blow you away.

“Little one. Ratchet.” Primus tries to call for your attention. Despite the way His voice reverberates through your struts, it takes enormous effort to focus beyond the pleasure clouding your processors. You moan as the cord inside your valve twitches. “Will you show me your spark, little one?” he whispers into your audials, and it is as if he was whispering directly into your processors.

Right now, you would do anything he asked you to. It is not so much choice on your part, but inevitable conclusion. The slight click as you unlock your chestplates nearly sends you over the edge when the vibrations hit your overly sensitive neural lines. The slithering parting of your laser-core iris is even more erotic, and you arch your back and dig your talons into His thighs as instinct makes you press your spark chamber forward for a merge. You can feel the heat rolling off your frame as your fans struggle to keep you cool. At your back, Primus is equally heated, his servos equally clawed, and you barely have enough processing power left to wonder how you will merge sparks when you are facing away from him.

Something touches the corona of your spark, and you howl with ecstasy. It feels like – like nothing you have ever felt before. You don't know what it is that touches you, because you can still feel both of Primus' servos grinding your valve into his spike. But you don't care when the sensation comes again – thin, spidery, touching everywhere and nowhere at once as the energy of your very being arcs against it. The sheer pleasure whites out your sensory input, the charge generated lacing everything with static. You keen and try to press closer into whatever it is that is fingering your spark so delicately. Your motion shifts the spike deep inside your valve, sending another shudder of electrons twirling through your neural lines.

“Open your optics,” Primus growls deep into the core of your processors. Your shutters obey before you can even think to follow his command.

You are left staring directly into the nexus of energy hanging in the center of the cave, your optics incapable of giving you anything but pain from its sheer brilliance. Instinctively you jerk your head away, your helmet thudding heavily against Primus' rib struts. His fields pulse with apology as something passes in front of your vision.

“Look again, little one,” he says and pets your flanks soothingly. “It won't let it hurt you.”

It takes more courage to follow His command than you want to admit. Carefully, you turn your head again, trying to ignore the optic-deep sting of overstressed photon receptors. Everything is still bright, too bright, but you discover that you can _see_. There must be some kind of filter in front of your optics, because for once the light doesn't completely blind you. Instead you feel like you are staring into the heart of a star, a vibrating orb of plasma with surface tendrils extending and collapsing back into the mass at irregular intervals. You gasp, trying to reconcile the idea of solar fusion happening so deep inside the core of your planet. You glance at enough power to... to, you don't know what, actually. But it must be more power in a microklick than Cybertron's energon production in an orn, and it should give off so much heat that you ought to have been flash-fried a long time ago.

There isn't enough time for you to think more about it because your strangely filtered input warns you that one of the surface eruptions stretches farther and farther towards you and your unprotected spark. The air around it strobes with overexcited halogen atoms, curling away and yet towards the highly potent electromagnetic radiation.

Primus holds you tight, his grip around your hips very secure. Somehow he has managed to pin your servos to your side, and you get the message. You are not to move, even if every core-deep instinct of yours goes against exposing your spark to the kind of energy nearing it. It will extinguish you, overload you within a nanoklick and then shatter your spark in all directions before you have time to become aware of your deactivation. Your ventilation comes quicker and harsher as you fight your base coding, watching with mounting trepidation as the tentacle made from pure plasma gets ready to touch you -

and your world implodes.

Thought vanishes, all perception of self is blown away as you are extinguished and reborn in the same motion. You are subsumed into the energy, the _spark_ you realize, the _spark of Primus_ , and it shows you things you never would have dared imagine. The room, the cave – the gigantic spark chamber of a mech of even more gigantic proportions. Of a mech that is so big he is a planet.

And you see yourself in that spark chamber, a tiny miniscule being hardly larger than a microphage would be compared to you. It is humbling to look at yourself like this, arched in the throes of ecstasy.

Somehow, your vision shows you alone without any mech holding you. Instead of the avatar of Primus, there are myriads of cables and tentacles holding your frame, providing you with something to sit on, grabbing your hips, restraining your arms, _dipping into your spark_...

Before you can do more than wonder about the lack of a mech holding your frame, you are swept outward. Layers and layers of metallic bones, the innards of your Maker pass by you. And they are magnificent. Their shape, fractal and chaotic at first glance, constructs patterns that a normal-sized mech – any mech really – would never be able to tell because it is of such gigantic proportions. Even you with your newly gained perspective can't make complete sense of them because they are too complex. But you know to the depth of your being that there is a larger, beautiful plan behind them. He would not allow anything else.

And between those humongous struts, there are empty spaces where life flourishes.

Microphages, creatures so tiny that by any right your larger-than-life perspective should have overlooked them completely. Nanobots, even smaller and even less sparked, populating every available surface and pooling into self-organizing puddles that nonetheless shape everything on a molecular level. Further towards the outer shell, small drones that subsist on metal and wiring, pulling unstable trace elements from Primus' crust and egesting purified Cybertronium, which in turn becomes the building material from which larger macrophages grow.

The further you proceed towards the surface, the bigger the lifeforms get. Not more frequent or better, but bigger. Small subterranean crawlers. Then something that might almost be called a turbofox if it subsisted entirely on carbon-rich iron composites. An entire ecosystem of metal-based lifeforms filling every single space in His frame.

And then, you encounter your first mech. It must be a miner, you think, as no other kind of mech would be found so deep beneath the surface of Cybertron. At first you didn't even realize that it was a mech you encountered – you thought the signal you felt was an echo of Primus reflected from somewhere above. On a second glance though, you can see that it isn't a mere echo but that it is the miner's _spark_. A spark that feels so similar to your God that you could have mistaken it.

Before you can contemplate that revelation, more and more sparks appear in you vision. All of them are reflections of His greatness. There are so many, and you feel that you know every single one of them. Before you even realize it, information on every single one of them floods your processors. Name, age, knowledge, emotions, character, anything you could ever imagine. The sheer mass of data is overwhelming And despite already looking at the entirety of all mechs on Cybertron, your scope still expands outward, away from Primus' surface to the seekers in the sky, the shuttles in orbit, the comet forms bound for other planets, the enclaves in other solar systems, until you become aware of every.

Single.

Spark in existence.

It occurs to you belatedly that your processors should have shorted out a long time ago from the amount of information flooding them. It nearly shorts you out anyway to realize you must have been borrowing from Primus' processing power to prevent just that.

There eventually comes a point where the expansion of your consciousness through a major part of your galaxy loses its momentum. It slows and slows until you are hanging weightlessly at the apex with more than twenty million sparks and tens of thousands of solar systems, populated and unpopulated, glowing in your mind. And then, mental gravity reasserts itself and your awareness collapses with increasing velocity until you think you are heading for a big bang.

You barely slow when you have only one single mech in your focus, too dazed to read more than basic functionality of his systems.

Just as Primus has taken you outward to see all his creation, he is taking you inward now to show you its details. Your consciousness zeroes in on that one mech's build, and yet structures of all different types of mech are flashing through your processors. Your medical knowledge tells you what you are seeing, pistons mounted on struts, coolant lines twisting around processor clusters and actuators, molecular welds connecting plates and segments, nanobots smoothing edges until the mech isn't so much a collection of parts as a single whole. There is core programming to provide base functionality, higher operating systems and neural nets for personality, memory banks for recall, and an otherworldly beautiful spark for individuality.

And between all that there is data flooding your processors, of how things works together, of how to fix frame and spark and processor, more petabytes per second than all your medical uploads to date combined. The information overwhelms you despite the processing space He allows you to borrow, and you can't put up any resistance against it being written directly into your memory banks as it comes.

When it finally slows down and you are left simply with that indescribable presence filling the space beyond your spark, inside your spark, around your spark, you are nearly catatonic. You don't even have strength left to ask Him 'why'. But you don't need to ask. As closely linked as you are, he feels your question before it even becomes data in your personality-net.

He floods you with trust and love, and a sad knowledge of necessity.

Bitter necessity.

Beyond your capacity for comprehension, you glimpse potential futures in His spark. More simulations than you could ever contemplate, with predictions that span more variables than even your currently enhanced consciousness is capable of processing. What you do get though is the general gist of those extrapolations, and it nearly freezes your spark.

Bad times are coming. Sometimes it is the Quintessons, sometimes the Nebulans, sometimes it is you Cybertronians yourselves. But there will be destruction and there will be suffering, and it will be bad.

You keen your anguish into His fields. Because you really don't want to know what will necessitate such medical skills, beyond anything medics a thousand times your age are currently capable of. You want to believe so badly that He gave you that knowledge just because Primus wants to elevate general medical care. But there is something coming, and your God wants you to... _heal them_ appears in your spark and your processors. _Keep them alive. Help them._

Grief and sadness and loss that hasn't happened yet accompanies the words, and yet beneath it all a kernel of strength and hope so immoveable that it could withstand cold fusion.

You gladly lean onto that strength because Primus' gift threatens to suffocate you. It is only slowly, very slowly that you calm down and that the deep merge loosens some of its hold on you.

Gradually, you become aware that you are still sitting in His lap, that there is still His spike inside you, and that there are still His cables caressing your spark in the most intimate manner. You know now that the mech avatar holding you is an illusion. It is a mass of tentacles beneath you, around you, _inside_ you, and to know this and yet not see or sense it, is electrifying. No wonder he was able to stimulate your spark chamber, your interface panel when it should have been impossible with the way you were lying across his lap. As it is you don't look back to the mech – or the tentacles – holding you. Instead, you keep your gaze focused on the otherworldly beauty of His spark as it spins in the gigantic spark chamber and burns and pulses and swallows you in its EM fields.

His grip, his tentacles, encroach tighter on you and squirm in a way the illusion of a mech might have been capable of. But the writhing inside your valve (along the rim and tickling every single sensor node and filling you so deep your anterior walls are stretched to the maximum) would be impossible for a regular spike. You clench your calipers and vent harder, because despite the increasing pressure and the tantalizing squirming you crave a rough sliding motion that will light every single one of your valve sensors in ecstasy. You want to be pounded into the throne, no care for your sore aft as He frags you to the pit and back.

He chuckles as He follows your thoughts effortlessly, but in a maddening turn of events he just carries on with what he is doing. His spark pulses ever more insistently, and there is no mistaking of the pleasure-arousal twisted deep into the amplitudes of His fields. But there is also a reminder that you are here for His pleasure and that things will happen like _He_ wants them to happen.

You arch to catch as much of those fields with your bared spark as you can, and His arms – tentacles – only hold you all the tighter for it. He – They are squirming inside you and stroking your every single sensor node with an attention for detail that translates into pure unadulterated charge.

The spark doesn't physically reach out for you again, but Primus is nonetheless there in your processors and your very being. His presence whispers to you how much He appreciates you, your frame and your spark, your kindness and your strength. There are electrons flocking to Him, flowing from Him into you until you think your capacitors are going to discharge spontaneously any moment now. Your natural lubricant makes everything so slick, and judging from the rubbing and squirming inside you there is more than one tentacle probing the depths of your valve...

When the charge finally triggers your overload, it differs from your earlier one like night and day. Instead of violent convulsions, it is an overflow, calm but inevitable and purposeful until even the weight of your armor plates against your microfilaments becomes a wondrous pleasure. You don't black out; you don't even see static in front of your optics. And still you lose yourself, lose all track of time as your overload _still_ continues flowing out of you. Until there is nothing left and you sag into the hold of His tentacles, and for once you are completely _calm_.

“You still didn't overload,” you finally say when the silence – filled by His ever-present hum, but silence nonetheless – can't cover anymore that His tentacles are still inside your valve. They are completely motionless, but their presence is unmistakable.

The spark chuckles despite the arousal still swirling in its eddies and currents. Although the illusion of a mech behind you isn't necessary anymore, the avatar speaks into your audials. “Do not worry about me, little one. I overloaded through you.”

You nod slowly, still doped up on your impossibly long release. Impossible for you alone, but not impossible if Primus channeled some of his own excess energy through you.

“Is that really enough for you?” you ask slowly, not comprehending how that might be satisfactory to a mech so much bigger than you. Not to mention that you completely don't understand why Primus can't overload himself. “Your spark is huge and the charge you generate must be enormous. How can you be satisfied with such a... limited release?”

Primus chuckles again, and non-existing rib struts vibrate against your back plating. “Oh, you are precious, little one. If my body overloaded, that would make things quite uncomfortable for life forms on my surface, wouldn't you agree? Uncomfortable, if not outright life-threatening. But did you think I would let you go after only one overload? Given enough outlet, even my excess charge will be depleted eventually.”

Your spark shivers, and your valve clenches reflexively around His cables inside you. The high priests could have _told_ you about this. This is a planet-sized mech that hasn't overloaded in a million stellar cycles, if you have read the implication correctly that He will only overload through one of His Touched. Why couldn't your predecessors have warned you? If there are more overloads waiting for you like the one you just had... “And you want me to - I –“

“I promise you will enjoy it,” your God laughs and pats your helmet as if you were a sparkling. And if there is a bit of apology in His fields, you choose to have it mean that your God is a bit uncomfortable with imposing on you like that. You don't want it to be an apology for the possible futures He has hinted at, ones where you will need all that medical knowledge He has gifted you.

But before you can start worrying, the charge is already building again. And you surrender yourself to the pleasure of it, of how your God plays your body like an instrument and chases all thoughts out of your processors.

It is beyond ecstasy.

Between one endless overload after the other – and they are growing longer as something within you adjusts to channeling a god's energy – the illusion of a mech's body falls away eventually. The tentacles roam your body, bury both you and inside you as they develop fine tendrils to explore the depths between your armor segment. They prod at your protoform, explore depths that only a complete disassembly of your internals would normally reveal. They push and pull at you, position you in ever new ways that only add to your charge.

(sitting on His throne with your legs spread wide until your pedes hang over the armrests and although your valve is exquisitely bared there is nothing inside only questing cilia exploring your spike until you feel you will go _mad_ )

(thrusting into an endless loop of tentacles spiraling around your spike while another one thrusts into your valve in a perfect mirror of your actions and a third and a fourth and a fifth one are stroking your aft so hard the soreness becomes _brilliant_ )

At one point, He does something, hijacks your coolant lines you think, because you are getting dangerously close to overheating despite going with the flow as much as possible. It feels as if microfilaments were wrapping around your lines and leeching off the heat, and while it brings you a few klicks of cooler lucidity it is soon lost again in the pleasure the immensely intimate touch and His constant charge generate.

(bent nearly in double with a cable tugging your spike down until it can stimulate the opening of your own valve and a net of secondary cables invading your systems until they can stroke your spark from _behind_ )

(servos caught above your head with cilla growing into every single digit to caress the multitude of transformation seams that make your servos your most important medical tool and capable of overloading you even without that same thing happening deep inside your _valve_ )

You lose yourself, forget where He ends and you begin. You think you recharge a couple of times, but if you do it is still a recharge filled with dreams of overloads until you can't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore. Maybe you drink some energon, some other fluids to replenish what you are losing in such copious amounts – where does the energon come from? how? - but it doesn't matter on the grand scale. There is never-ending pleasure and a constant flow and draw as you serve Him and become a conduit for His energies.

(held completely immobile with only a single tentacle building an electric charge a micron away from your spark until the difference in potential becomes strong enough to release in an arc and then the tentacle just resets and starts again and again and _again_ )

Eventually though, the aroused pull from His spark ebbs off and you tiredly overload one last time (so tired you can't brace anymore against the currents flowing through you and they just come as they wish and go as they wish and sweep you along until they fade into obscurity)

When He finally releases you, both mentally and physically, you feel wrung out in a way you never have before. Even unshuttering your optics is too much of a task to contemplate. You can still feel Him, but for once He is outside your reach and only watching you. Doesn't matter, because you still feel Him inside your spark, and you don't think this feeling will ever go away.

“Recharge now, little one,” he says, and you drift off beneath His calm and ever-watching presence.


	4. Epilogue

The fade-in is slower than you have ever woken before. You become aware of a thorough defrag smoothing your performance, and for a while you just observe lazily how it optimizes your code, your memory distribution. Your operating system carries the feel of an impossibly detailed maintenance overhaul. Conflicting lines of code have been resolved, unused and obsolete sections have been cleaned out. The rerouting around faulty processor circuits, which gradually piles up during long vorns of function, has been streamlined and unified. You don't think you have ever seen a mech older than two vorns run this smoothly and this error-free.

When you widen your focus from marveling about your performance to determining what exactly your processors are performing, you become aware of an indexing task that is, for some reason, still running. Has been running for three orns by now and is nowhere near finished. You take a look at what it is indexing, and you find knowledge that is new, that you have no memory of acquiring. It is medical knowledge, petabyte after petabyte filling your banks to the point that you wonder how it can all be compressed into there.

The indexing task is doing its best to make that knowledge available to you, but you are only too aware of the difference between automated tagging and real processing. Judging by the amount still left untagged after three orns, you think it will take you several hundred vorns to truly assimilate the data. Your spark is giddy with excitement – until the loading of your short-term working memory is complete and you remember.

The first you feel is an absence that almost hurts physically. Without unshuttering your optics or turning on any other sensor, you know that you are alone again and far from His presence. It is nearly unbearable after all that time you have spent so close to Him, after having been His conduit for what seems like forever. But you feel it in the depths of your spark that your immediate duty to Him is done, that you have returned to life, and that He expects you to go on and use what He has gifted you with.

You don't know yet how long you have been with Primus, but you are all too keenly aware of how you are missing the steady EM field of His spark, the constant hum, the amorphously changing light, His brilliant presence in your processors. Everything is _silent_ around you in a way that feels dead.

This is what coming back from having been His Touched feels like.

It is only now that your motor control reactivates, and the first you do is unshutter your optics. Instead of too-bright spark energy, you are faced with darkness. Not an empty darkness but one filled with the stars above Cybertron. You remember only too well how Primus has taken your awareness on a journey out to those stars, to every single last one of His creation, and your spark can't decide whether it wants to be awed by the sheer greatness, or grieved by the loss of your connection to Him.

You feel so empty after having been His vessel for such a long time.

The ground beneath your backplates hits your sensors next. It is fissured and jagged in the way only microphage-built structures can be. They reintegrate loose metal shavings into the nearest large-scale molecular grid without shape or plan, resulting in the most bizarre formations if left alone long enough. You think there hasn't been any mech around for a hundred vorns at least.

Slowly you sit up. Your neural lines and your motor control have that same better-than-new feeling you have already observed from your processors. In fact, they operate so smoothly that the complete absence of exceptions almost registers as an exception itself.

What you see is a wide plane with what might be a city structure looming far off in the horizon. If Primus hadn't shown you His surface from His perspective, you would think the place barren of life. As it is, your optics still don't detect anything, but you are very much aware of the countless micro- and macrophages, of the nanobots, of the tiny electromagnetic fields of the mechanimals that are bound to be around. Everything is so quiet, seems even more quiet because the atmosphere here is much thinner than down in Primus' spark. Even the wind is silent.

You don't know how long you simply sit there, trying to come to terms with what has happened. With what a Touched is. With what it means for you, for Him, for all of Cybertron. It is certainly long enough for a group of bots to emerge from the maybe-city on the horizon and come all the way out here to you. When they are close enough, you identify the purple glyph of High Priest marking the silvered chest plates of at least three of them. So you are probably close to Simfur because high priests hardly ever leave their home city.

You are close to where everything began.

It occurs to you only now that you had no way of knowing whether that group of mechs was benign. It could just as well have been a band of scrappers out to look for some spare parts. You should have at least taken some precautions instead of merely sitting there. But you doubt that any high priest will allow harm to come to an unarmed mech. Unless it is a fake high priest.

The group stops a respectful distance away, and only one of the high priests approaches you any further, his EM fields pulsing with wonder. To your surprise, he lowers himself to his knees and bows deeply to you. What in Unicron's name?

“Blessed be your return, Ratchet, Touched of Primus. Our Creator has sent me a vision that something important might be found out here, but I had never thought it would be you! It is a great honor to have your presence amongst us again, Touched One. Please, let us guide you to the temple so that you may rest and recover from the rigors of your service, and maybe share the wisdoms you gained from Him.”

You set and reset your vocalizer a couple of times, still too baffled by a _high priest_ bowing to you to react in any way. “Come with you?”

“Yes, Touched One,” he nods respectfully with awe covering his every spoken glyph, “so that all of Cybertron's children may celebrate your return.”

Despite the solemn atmosphere of near-worship, the first thing that crosses your processors is a groan of 'please, no'. You had enough of temples and celebrating while they were turning you into a sacrifice to throw into the Well of All Sparks. And then the full implications hit, that they probably expect you to have become a wise high-priestly sort to join them in praying.

 _Primus_ no.

Amusement briefly flashes through your spark, so short and distant that you might have imagined it. But you are sure that you aren't mistaken, and that it hasn't been one of your own making. You want so badly to believe that your God hasn't abandoned you after all. Everything still feels so empty and insubstantial after your experience down there with Him.

An echo of comfort, then a mild rebuke. It lingers in your processors and highlights your flaws in thinking until you gently shove back at it. Yes, yes, you get it. He hasn't left you; your sensors just need time to readjust to normal parameters again, and you ought to feel guilty for having doubted Him. Which you don't. Not at all. Because you remember all too well how He has punished you for your faults, even if the pain in your aft is long gone.

The return of your snark surprises you a bit. It is one of your basic character traits, and it was almost conspicuous in its absence while you were with Him. Maybe the presence of other mechs brings out the worst in you. Maybe this is because you are away from the overwhelming influence of His fields. Maybe you are finally recovering from those interchanging episodes of terror and awe that started with being made to jump down that thrice-cursed well.

Maybe normality is simply reasserting itself.

Well, as much as it can be normal to have a high priest bowing to you like this.

“Thank you,” you finally agree after some prodding from Primus – still so faint that you think you might have imagined it, but you are getting better at feeling His distant presence in your spark. “Some rest would be nice.”

Not to mention that you've still got several defrag processes and indexing tasks running, which would benefit nicely from some recharge. And you still have no clue how much time has passed, whether your old job is still available, whether you want to return to it at all, what you're supposed to do with all that unprocessed knowledge floating in your memory banks, and what your current housing situation is.

Yes, returning to the temple is the best choice for now. You can work on starting your new life tomorrow.

And giving Wheeljack, Velocity, and Strongarm a good smack over their helmets for getting you into this mess to begin with, will be your very first priority.

Maybe you will even face them to overload afterwards.


End file.
